Papers by Karolina Drozdowska
Folia Scandinavica Posnaniensia, 2023
The research question this article tries to answer is: how was Scandinavia “invented” in Polish p... more The research question this article tries to answer is: how was Scandinavia “invented” in Polish prose written when the Iron Curtain still physically divided Europe? The text discusses three novels written by Joanna Chmielewska (1932–2013) and published in 1969 (Krokodyl z Kraju Karoliny [The Crocodile from Caroline’s Country]), 1973 (Lesio) and 1974 (Wszystko czerwone [All in Red]). Chmielewska, a vastly popular Polish crime novelist, especially known for the creation of the so-called “ironic crime” sub-genre, often introduced depictions of Denmark and the country’s inhabitants in her novels and used them to demonstrate amusing contrasts between them and her Polish protagonists and their reality in Poland. My goal is to show that while Westerners constructed and exoticized the East, Easterners did the very same thing to the West, only using different values and criteria in order to distinguish between “us” and “them”. We should therefore perhaps start talking about “inventing Europe” or “inventing Europes” – where the West invents the East and the East invents the West, and xenostereotypes introduce and reinforce autostereotypes. Those stereotypes can sometimes become so extreme that they are no longer sustainable and “collapse” under their own weight.
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nordics.info, 2024
The concept of ‘narrative’ (as opposed to ‘reality’) is prevalent in the press, particularly with... more The concept of ‘narrative’ (as opposed to ‘reality’) is prevalent in the press, particularly with respect to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The recognition of people creating and recreating themselves via the stories they tell themselves and/or others is universal and nothing new. But literary and psychological analyses can help us understand what is going on in the world today.
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Scandinavistica Vilnensis, 2023
The trauma of the Second World War and the Holocaust has been a broadly explored topic in Norwegi... more The trauma of the Second World War and the Holocaust has been a broadly explored topic in Norwegian culture in the last tenfifteen years. This, in turn, resulted in a massive popularity of both fiction and non-fiction literature where the topic is prominent, as well as a growing interest in postmemory studies among literary scholars. This paper discusses the motif of Stolpersteine in three Norwegian literary texts, published between the years 2016 and 2019: two novels, No, a Hundred Times No by Nina Lykke, Keep Saying Their Names by Simon Stranger and one essay, "Snublesteinene i Oslo" ["Stoplersteine in Oslo"] by Ole Robert Sunde, published in an anthology entitled The Homeland & Other Stories. Stolpersteine ("stumbling stones") are commemorative brass plaques in the pavement in front of the last address of victims of National Socialism. This remembrance project was started by the German artist Gunter Demnig in the 1990s and there are now tens of thousands of "stones" placed in over a thousand locations in Europe, also in Norway. The aim of this paper is to answer two questions: firstly, what formal function the motif plays in the three chosen texts and, secondly, how can Stolpersteinene become bearers of memory and postmemory, according to the theoretical framework developed around the topic of war and trauma.
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Studia Scandinavica, 2022
This article reflects on the issue of spatiality in Gaute Heivoll's novel Kongens hjerte [The Kin... more This article reflects on the issue of spatiality in Gaute Heivoll's novel Kongens hjerte [The King's Heart] from 2011, and analyzes how different descriptions of space interplay with illness metaphors in the text, contributing to a literary imaging of illness as "a road to health. " Kongens hjerte is a historical novel set in the second half of the eighteenth century, telling the story of a father and his ill daughter traveling from Norway to Copenhagen in order to seek treatment. The girl suffers from radesyke, a mysterious and lethal disease whose etiology remains unclear up to this day. After a theoretical introduction and outlining the context, the paper suggests possible lines of analysis of the spatiality aspects in the novel and moves on to a detailed reflection upon two categories: the presence/absence of the father and daughter in the same space, and the horizontal/ vertical orientation of the protagonists' bodies. The conclusion of the study is that constructions of space and spatiality are a coherent and immanent component of the illness images in Heivoll's novel, enabling a wide range of reading alternatives and supplying additional contexts for possible interpretations of the text.
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M. Sibińska (red.) Nordycka powieść historyczna w XXI wieku, 2022
A translator faced with a historical novel "in the making". The Sister Bells by Lars Mytting Pub... more A translator faced with a historical novel "in the making". The Sister Bells by Lars Mytting Publishing novel trilogies has been a popular phenomenon on the Norwegian market during the last few years. Translation rights to many of them have been sold to different countries, where the translators are being faced with a challenge of working with a text which only constitutes the first prat of a larger story, not knowing how the plot and its details are going to be developed. This text aims at a reflection upon the translator's specific role in a network created around the process of bringing a trilogy "in the making" from one language to another. The case study concentrates upon the novels The Sister Bells and The Hekne Tapestry written by Lars Mytting (two parts of a planned trilogy), published in Norway respectively in 2018 and 2020. As a theoretical background, the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is going to be implemented. The goal of the theoretical part of this text is also to try and define the novels' genre, reflect upon the notion of "historical fantasy" and answer the question how working with this particular kind of text makes the translator's experience unique. The study concentrates upon the roles and strategies the translator takes upon themselves as an actor in this very specific network.
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A Lifetime Dedicated to Norwegian Language and Literature Papers in Honour of Professor Sanda Tomescu Baciu, 2021
The Shadow Book by Lars Saabye Christensen (published in Norway in 2019) is the last part of the ... more The Shadow Book by Lars Saabye Christensen (published in Norway in 2019) is the last part of the Echoes of the city trilogy, and, according to the author himself, was supposed to be the last novel he has ever written. Saabye Christensen fell seriously ill while working on the book-a process he makes a part of the novel's plot, interweaving himself and his diagnosis into the text. The aim of this article is to place the novel within the rich Norwegian tradition of «reality literature» (virkelighetslitteratur), showing why and in what ways The Shadow Book should be perceived as a unique and highly original project. A range of methods that have so far been applied by literature researchers in order to analyze this particular genre will be presented and the most adequate of those tools will be used to «dissect» and discuss Lars Saabye Christensen's text. The article also attempts to prove that applying analytic methods used in illness studies (discussing metaphors of illness) can shed some new light on this particular novel, and potentially open new spaces of interpretation of other texts within the "reality literature" genre. Finally, the article aims at analyzing the role of the author's journey to Cluj in Romania as a potential catalyst for giving The Shadow Book its highly unique form.
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Przekładaniec, 2020
Norwegian crime fiction is a genre which has gained enormous popularity among readers around the ... more Norwegian crime fiction is a genre which has gained enormous popularity among readers around the world over the past several years, and this creates a greater demand for translation of this kind of literature. The purpose of this text is to take a closer look at mistakes in Norwegian source texts a translator has to face when working with this genre. The article gives a short summary of potential causes of these mistakes, attempts to categorize them and describes possible ways of correcting them. The main argument is that the translator's role and identity change in this process, as the translator often has to perform the tasks of an additional editor or proofreader. The crime novels analyzed here are: Blod i dans [Dance with the Devil] by Gard Sveen, Møt meg i paradis [Meet me in Paradise] by Heine Bakkeid and Alt er mitt [Everything is Mine] by Ruth Lillegraven.
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Archiwum Emigracji, 2021
The aim of this article is to present how images of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans are cons... more The aim of this article is to present how images of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans are constructed in modern Norwegian prose. The theoretical framework of the text is based upon Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe and Edward W. Said’s Orientalism. It can be argued that the European “West” still defines the “East” as an opposition to what it constitutes itself, even though the Iron Curtain, represented by the Berlin Wall, came down in the year 1989. Larry Wolff argues that the concept of the Iron Curtain is much older than the curtain itself (which, according to Winston Churchill, divided Europe in 1946), and that is why it still determines people’s understanding of Europe as two opposing spaces. Eastern Europe can be therefore perceived as “the Orient” in the sense Said defines this term. This has not changed even in 2004, when many Central European countries joined the European Union, and the political map of the continent was redefined. The article gives a brief summary of the situation of Eastern European minorities in Norway and moves on to the analysis of how these minorities are represented in literature. Six literary works (crime fiction written by Jørn Lier Horst and Gard Sveen, novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, Nina Lykke and Anne B. Ragde and a short story by Mikkel Vika), all published in the years 2004–2017, are analyzed with regards to how images of the space that is Eastern Europe and the people coming from this space are constructed in each book. The article argues that the abovementioned images are built on dichotomic concepts such as modernity-backwardness, wealth-poverty or rationality-irrationality. Finally, the text attempts to present an answer to the question if, why and how the images of Eastern Europeans might change, evolve and transform in Norwegian literature in the future.
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Nordlit, 2020
The aim of this article is to present how Knut Hamsun’s works travel across the political borders... more The aim of this article is to present how Knut Hamsun’s works travel across the political borders, but also across genre frontiers, that is: how his epic texts have functioned on the Polish scenes. The article begins with a historical presentation of Hamsun’s works in Polish translation from the 1890’s until today. Next, a list over all the Polish dramatizations of his novels is presented and discussed. Two stage productions, that is Tangen (2005, directed by Łukasz Witt-Michałowski) and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger(Głód Knuta Hamsuna, 2010, realized by Łukasz Witt-Michałowski og Ryszard Kalinowski) is closely analyzed, with regards to the technical solutions and approaches used in the performances and the theatre theories those solutions or approaches result from. The article also describes how both the productions were received by the Polish theatre critics.
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AUC PHILOLOGICA, 2020
This article presents a case study of the translation process of Julie Andem's SKAM scenarios (or... more This article presents a case study of the translation process of Julie Andem's SKAM scenarios (originally published in Norwegian in 2018) into Polish, focusing upon the challenges a translator has to face when confronted with a very specific, unedited text and different multimedial actors involved in the said process. It analyzes the question of how their existence and activity in the network influences the translator's roles and strategies. SKAM (broadcast from 2015 to 2017), originally never meant to be distributed outside of Norway, gained massive popularity and became a global phenomenon, with large groups of fans all around the world. The article gives a brief presentation of the series itself and moves on to describe the books' unique form, before outlining the theoretical background for the case study: the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The article analyzes the translator in confrontation with three different groups of actors, describing how they influence the process, thus forcing the translator to adapt to new roles and take on new tasks. This text may also serve as a starting point for a broader reflection upon the place of a literary translator in a changing, globalized cultural reality.
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Porównania, 2020
The aim of this paper is to present the role of the original text’s author as an actor in the pro... more The aim of this paper is to present the role of the original text’s author as an actor in the process of translating modern Norwegian literature into Polish. Basing on the actor-network theory (ANT) and experience from my own work as a literary translator, I present the features of different types of interaction between the author and the translator, placing those interactions in the context of the specific conditions of the Norwegian book market that, because of its high level of integration, stimulates and encourages such interactions. I reflect upon the role of the author in the translation process presenting three categories – so-called “levels” of author-translator collaboration, conducting case studies of the translation processes I myself have been involved in.
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E. Khachaturyan, Á. Llosa Sanz (ed.) Scandinavia through Sunglasses. Spaces of Cultural Exchange between Southern/Southeastern Europe and Nordic Countries, 2019
The aim of this paper is to present Eugenio Barba's work as an intercultural mediator between the... more The aim of this paper is to present Eugenio Barba's work as an intercultural mediator between the Polish and the Norwegian theatre milieus in the 1960s. Barba, who was born in Italy, moved to Norway and studied there in the late 1950s, before travelling to Poland and becoming an assistant of Jerzy Grotowski in his legendary Theatre of 13 Rows. During the years he spent there, Barba wrote regularly to his Norwegian friend in Oslo, Jens Bjørneboe, trying to initiate a Polish-Norwegian theatre and culture cooperation project. The paper concentrates on the story of this correspondence and describes the situation that took place after Barba came back to Norway in 1964. It also explains the origins of Odin Teatret, a theatre Barba created in Oslo, inspired by his Polish experiences.
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Politeja, 2019
The aim of this paper is to present the concept of Jens Bjørneboe’s version of epic drama. This p... more The aim of this paper is to present the concept of Jens Bjørneboe’s version of epic drama. This phenomenon is explained with the help of a “border”‑criterium, showing how the Norwegian author established, defined and crossed borders on many different levels in his dramatic works and their adaptations on stage. Bjørneboe is presented as an author who not only consciously uses the border‑criterium to manipulate space and reality in his play Til lykke med dagen, but also expands or even crosses borders of theatrical theories and conventions, mainly Bertolt Brecht’s concepts. His “epic plays” are hybrid in their forms, joining different European traditions and expanding beyond what was common and accepted in the peripheral (both geographically and culturally) Norwegian theatre world of the 1960’s.
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W. Wołowski, J. Cymerman (red.) Teatr Wart Przypomnienia. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, ss. 107–120.
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Acta Sueco-Polonica, 2018
The aim of this paper is to analyse the Polish translation of Jens Bjørneboe’s play from 1966, Fu... more The aim of this paper is to analyse the Polish translation of Jens Bjørneboe’s play from 1966, Fugleelskerne (The Bird Lovers, Polish title Ornitofile) into Polish, with particular focus on the question of potential ideologisation of the target text. First, we give a short historical summary of how the source text was created, concentrating especially on the author’s collaboration with Eugenio Barba and his contacts with the Polish theatre milieu of the 1960’s. Secondly, we present the historical context the translation has to be analysed in and give a short summary of Harald Kittel’s approach to translation analysis. Lastly, elements of the source and target texts are analysed, with particular focus upon changes and shifts which might be perceived as a proof of the fact that one can in fact find elements of ideologization in the Polish translation of the play.
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Studia Scandinavica, 2018
The aim of this text is to analyze Linn Ullmann’s novel Unquiet (published in 2015) as a literary... more The aim of this text is to analyze Linn Ullmann’s novel Unquiet (published in 2015) as a literary account of a family history and death of the author’s father, Ingmar Bergman. The article concentrates on how Ullmann, through different formal strategies, manages to tell a very intimate story without reducing it to tabloid-like coverage. First, the article briefly discusses autobiographism, biographism, autofiction and performative biographism as dominating tendencies in Norwegian literature in the 2010’s, placing Ullmann’s novel in this context. Secondly, theoretical perspectives which might be employed in the process of analyzing Unquiet are defined. Lastly, the novel’s form is analyzed with regard to this particular approach. The article’s aim is to present Linn Ullmann’s Unquiet as a novel hybrid in its form, and thus, an one-of-a-kind phenomenon in modern Norwegian literature.
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All About Pratchett czyli wszystko o sir Terrym Pratchetcie. Gdańsk, Sopot: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2018
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Kultura i Polityka 21/2017
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Witold Wołowski (ed.) Le Théâtre à (re)découvrir I. Intermédia / Intercultures. Études de linguistique, littérature et art 28. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018
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Czas Kultury, 2018
This text is an attempt to read Semmelweis, a drama by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe as a react... more This text is an attempt to read Semmelweis, a drama by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe as a reaction to the students’ revolt that swept through Western Europe. First of all, the analysis of the piece and its origin allows to show the specificity of the then Norwegian cultural and political discourse which developed in peripheral Europe; second of all, it shows an interesting outlook of Jens Bjørneboe on the students’ riots as such. As it turns out, the Norwegian writer saw them as noble uprisings, but doomed to failure, only paving the way for a global anarchist revolution.
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Papers by Karolina Drozdowska
The aim of the paper is to present the problem of translating Scandinavian literature into Polish, with a special focus on how interactions between the specific languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) can be and are translated – as this particular aspect poses significant problems both for the translator and the reader/viewer. As a translator of Norwegian literature, I have come across a number of cases where Swedish or Danish words and phrases have been “woven” into the Norwegian text – translating such language interactions into Polish can pose a significant problem, especially when the Polish reader is unaware of the regional historic and/or cultural context. It is therefore my opinion that interactions between specific Scandinavian languages in translated texts can be perceived as elements of the foreign (according to A. Bermanʼs theories) and should be approached as such by the translator, who, at the same time, should remain aware of the deforming forces he or she is going to be forced to face in the translation process (with special focus on the destruction of underlying networks of signification, the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization, and the effacement of the superimposition of languages).
For many years, “Scandinavia” has been an exotic term for Poles. Both cultural and economic exchange was very limited and a lot of stereotypes arose – not only about the Scandinavians themselves, but also their language (difficult to understand) and culture (very little accessible). In the last years, and especially after 2004, when Poland joined the EU and European borders stood open for Polish workers, the situation has been changing rapidly. Poles are, at the moment, a large minority in the Scandinavian countries (the largest minority in Norway), and this has also contributed considerably to the cultural exchange between Poland and the entire region. This has resulted in a growing interest in Scandinavian literature and an accordingly growing demand for translations from those languages. It is my opinion, that to translate from a Scandinavian language into Polish needs also to be combined with helping the reader/viewer understand what the Scandinavian region actually is and what the interactions between the countries constituting it – and therefore, their languages – are. To translate is therefore to explain. And, in this explanation, we have to forget about globalization and growing nationalism for a while and start perceiving Scandinavia as a historical and cultural region – otherwise the language interactions (and cultural interactions they implicate) will become completely illegible for the reader/viewer of the translated text.
6-8 November 2019 - Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
and
https://booksfromnorway.com/translators/12-karolina-drozdowska
Studia Północnoeuropejskie vol. II;
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego 2017